Finnegans Wake (1939) by James Joyce & the Great Irish Novel

Finnegans Wake (1939) by James Joyce was first published over eighty years ago on May 4, 1939 and gets its name from the Irish-American ballad “Finnegan’s Wake” that has the lines that reveal much of the themes found in Joyce’s famed novel: “We had lots of fun at Finnegan’s Wake… One morning Tim… Fell from a ladder and he broke his skull, and they carried him home his corpse to wake… Tim jumped like a Trojan from the bed… do ye think I’m dead?”

In Finnegans Wake and the “Strangest Dream that was ever Halfdreamt” (p 307) the reader may find direct references and allusions to, among many others, Catholicism, Thor, Euclid, Don Juan, the Kabbalah, the Holocaust, collapsed patriarchs, intrapsychic states and forces, hen and eggs, Guinness beer, elves, the River Liffey, resurrection and creation myths, Humpty Dumpty (the World Egg or the Cosmic Egg), the Egyptian Book of the Dead, William Blake’s Albion & the Four Zoas, all things Irish and Celtic, and an estimated sixty to seventy languages (such as Armenian, English, French, German, Latin and Swahili).

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, Irish Novelist (1882-1941)

The reader may also find some futuristic-modern words and phrases in Finnegans Wake, which was published in 1939, such as “iSpace” (p 124), “batman” (p 162), “fast and furious” (p 174), “twitter” (p 193), “vanity fair” (p 213), “Harley Quinn” (p 221), “hogwarts” (p 296), “Wheel of Fortune” (p 405), “Greedo” (p 411), and “émail” (p 575). And these references eerily echo-spark Joyce’s words to life: “All that has been done has yet to be done and done again” (p 194).

What is fantastic to note about Finnegans Wake is how low languages (e.g., slang) is seamlessly interwoven with high languages (e.g., Latin), bringing meaning out of construction, a kind of organizational disorder which further reflects on preculture chaos. It is then no surprise for the reader to understand when he writes “That’s the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso many counterpoint words. What can’t be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for. Now, the doctrine obtains, we have occasioning cause causing effects and affects occasionally recausing altereffects. Or I will let me take it upon myself to suggest to twist the penman’s tale posterwise. The gist is the gist of Shaum but the hand is the hand of Sameas. Shan – Shim – Schung” (pgs 482-483).

One thing to always remember when reading the 628-page novel is that “the present is the wake of the past” (Key, p 343) and that “the logic of Finnegans Wake is the logic of slumber and druidic myth” (Key, p 346). Also remember that the unorthodox spellings belong to James Joyce, so prepare to enter into his creation as he reminds us: “If there is a future in every past that is present” (p 496). While reading Finnegans Wake, one cannot, too, forget Nietzsche when he said, “I write in blood, I will be read in blood.”

“What has gone? How it ends?

“Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from
every sides, with all gestures, in each our word. Today’s truth, tomorrow’s
trend.

“Forget, remember!

“Have we cherished expectations? Are we for liberty of
perusiveness? Whyafter what forewhere? A plainplanned liffeyism assemblements
Eblania’s conglomerate horde. By dim delty Deva.

The annamation of evabusies, the livlianess of her
laughings, such as plurity of bells! (p 568)

Alla tingaling pealabells! (p 569)

Annshee lispes privily (p 571)

attendance and lounge and promenade (p 578)

ambling limfy peepingpartner (p 580)

Arrive, likkypuggers, in a poke! (p 613)

Are we for liberty of perusiveness? (p 614)

A plainplanned liffeyism assemblements (p 614)

ancient legacy of the past (pgs 614-615)

and a lady!) pulling (p 618)

Alma Luvia, Pollabella (p 619)

Shem
& Shaun in Finnegans Wake

Shem & Shaun represent the “Twin Hero” found in
many myths (Key, p 297) and they are called by Joyce as the “doubleparalleled
twixtytwins,” as in “Rhombulus and Rhebus” from the “eternal Rome” (pgs 286,
298). While Shem is the favorite of ALP (the Mother), Shaun is the favorite of
HCE (the Father).

What follows is a breakdown of the various names and
symbols Shem & Shaun go by in the book:

Shem / Shaun:

Jerry Porter / Kevin Porter

Cain / Abel

Romulus / Remus

Amor / Roma

Dolph / Kev

Butt Mutt / Taff Jute

Caddy / Primas

Caseous (Cheese, Cassius) / Burrus (Butter, Brutus)

Gripes (Grapes) / Mookse (the Fox)

Glugg / Chuff

Devil / St. Michael, an archangel (Christ-figure)

Cad-Assailant-Beggar / Professor Jones (HCE + Shaun)

Penman / Postman

Seducer / Jaun (& Haun)

Paraclete / Yawn

Elmtree / Stone

Chance / Permanence

Mercy / Justice

Mercius / Justius

Esau / Jacob

Set / Horus

Nick / Mick

Time / Space

What is further interesting to note is that in Book 2,
Chapter 2, Dolph (Shem) tricks his brother into drawing a diagram with the
initials of his mother ALP saying “A is for Anna like L is for liv. Aha hahah”
(p 293). Kev (Shaun), who thought he was drawing the Euclid diagram, soon
realizes the diagram he has actually drawn is in the form and shape of ALP’s
genitalia, legs spread wide. Kev (Shaun/Abel) then strikes his brother Dolph
(Shem/Cain) for the trick.

The 4 Ages of the Viconian Civilizational Cycles: Age
of Thunderclap (thunderburst), Age of Marriage (ravishment), Age of
Disintegration (dissolution), Age of Return (providentiality); see page 362

“In the buginning is the woid, in the muddle is the
sounddance and thereinofter you’re in the unbewised again, vund vulsyvolsy” (p
378).

“the fourth commandment with promise” (p 62)

“the grimm grimm tale of the four of hyacinths” (p
335)

“at the turn of the fourth of the hurdles” (p 342)

The Four Masks (p 367)

“Our four avunculusts” (p 367)

“fourdimmansions” [four dimensions, four dim mansions]
(p 367)

Priest-Mayor-King-Merchant (p 447)

Success, Pleasure, Duty, Enlightenment; see Key page
87

The # 39:

“thirtynine several manners” (p 573)

“thirtynine years” (p 574)

“under articles thirtynine of the reconstitution” (p
596)

“looking most plussed with (exhib 39) a clout” (p 607)

Finnegans
Wake was published in 1939

The 39 Articles of the High Church of England (The 39
Articles of Religion)

Romans 3:9 = “What then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin”

The # 1001:

“Skertsiraizde with Donyahzade” [direct reference to
the characters Scheherazade & Dunyazad in the book One Thousand and One Nights (c. 1706-1721), which is a collection of Middle Eastern
folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age] (p 32)

“since in this scherzarade of one’s thousand one
nightinesses that sword of certainty which would indentifide the body never
falls” (p 51)

“Thousand to One” (p 342)

“a thousand and one times” (p 519)

“his alladim lamps” [his Aladdin lamps] (p 560)

“one thousand and one other blessings” (p 617)

“One in a thousand of years of the nights?” (p 627)

There are nine Thunderclaps with 100 letters in each, and one Thunderclap with 101 letters, making the total number of letters for all ten Thunderclaps an exact 1,001. See pages 3, 23, 44, 90, 113, 257, 314, 332, 414, 424. The Ten Thunderclaps could also represent the Ten Commandments of the Holy Bible (1611).

“swansway” (p 450) & “Watch the swansway” (p 465) = Marcel Proust in his epic novels creating In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927), including Swann’s Way (1913), also references and alludes to the book One Thousand and One Nights (c. 1706-1721)

The # 1132:

“1132 A.D.” (pgs 13, 14)

“Subsec. 32, section 11, of the C.L.A. act 1885” (p
61)

“in number 32 at the Rum and Puncheon… 11/- in the
week” (pgs 69-70)

“patent number 1132” (p 310)

“thirty two eleven” (p 338)

“elve hundred and therety and to years” (p 347)

“11.32” (p 348)

“1132 S.O.S.” (p 387)

“round about the freebutter year of Notre Dame 1132
P.P.O. or so” (p 388)

“neer the Queen’s Colleges, in 1132 Brian or Bride
street” (p 388)

“lived to a great age at or in or about the late No.
1132 or No. 1169” (p 389)

“from his elevation of one yard one handard and
thartytwo lines” (p 389)

“in or aring or around about the year of buy in
disgrace 1132 or 1169 or 1768 Y.W.C.A.” (p 391)

“on their old one page codex book of old year’s eve
1132, M.M.L.J. old style” (p 397)

“31 Jan. 1132 A.D.”
(p 420)

“Not known at 1132 a. 12 Norse Richmound” (p 420)

“the hoyth of number eleven… about thirtytwo minutes’
time” (p 448)

“eleven to thirtytwo seconds” (p 516)

“eleven thirsty too” (p 517)

“No 11 hundred and thirty 2” (p 574)

Romans 11:32 = “For God has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all.”

1132 feet per
second: the speed of sound in air (Finnegans
Wake is best understood when heard)

32 feet per
second per second: acceleration due to gravity
at the surface of the Earth (similar to the Fall in Finnegans Wake)

In many ways Finnegans Wake resembles the Book of Kells (dated 9th century). Written in Latin and also known as the Book of Columba, the mysterious book contains the Four Gospels of the Holy Bible along with various texts and tables. It is then of no great shock when Joyce refers to the Book of Kells and the famous “Tunc page” throughout his work of fiction.

“The Book of Kells,” writes Joseph Campbell, “a magnificently illuminated sixth or ninth century Irish Psalter, was buried, like our letter [the one found by the hen in Finnegans Wake], to protect it from the invading Danes, and was dug up again, centuries later, very badly damaged. The meticulously executed, unbelievable intricacy of the profoundly suggestive ornament of this monk work so closely resembles in its essential character the workmanship of Finnegans Wake that one is not entirely surprised to find Joyce describing the features of his own masterwork in language originally applied to the very much earlier monument of Celtic art…

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“The illumination is an astonishing comment on this text,
strangely suggestive of pre-Christian and oriental symbols. The reader of Finnegans Wake will not fail to
recognize in this page something like a mute indication that here is the key to
the entire puzzle: and he will be the more concerned to search its meaning when
he reads Joyce’s boast on page 298: ‘I’ve read your tunc’s dismissage’” (Key, p
101).

The
Legend of Tristan & Isolde in Finnegans
Wake

Being a Celtic legend, Tristan and Isolde is
frequently visited and revisited throughout Finnegans
Wake, especially in Book II, Chapter IV. The name “Tristan” takes on many
variations (within the book and without), such as “Tristram” or “Tristrem” or
“Trustan” while the name “Isolde” can appear as “Iseult” or “Isolt” or “Usolde”
or “Yesult.”

“All the birds of the sea they trolled out rightbold
when they smacked the big kuss of Trustan and Usolde” (p 383).

“Hear, O hear, Iseult la belle! Tristan, sad hero,
hear!” (p 398).

A great resource and second companion (in addition to Henry Morton Robinson & Joseph Campbell’s A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, originally published in 1944) is Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God, Volume IV: Creative Mythology (1968).

“James Joyce develops the Tristan theme anew, with all
its ‘equals of opposites,’ throughout the ever-revolving labyrinth of his
dream-book, Finnegans Wake. His first
paragraph opens with the words, ‘Sir Tristram, violer d’amores…,’ and
Chapelizod, the legendary birthplace of Isolt, on the bank of the river Liffey,
beside Dublin’s Phoenix Park, is the chief scene of its dream events. The
guilt-laden sleeper, through whose whiskey-soaked interior landscape we are
following the lead and lectures of an erudite tourist guide, ‘of the
every-tale-a-treat-in-itself variety’ (as Dante followed the lead and lectures
of Virgil through his own sin-laden, visionary Purgatory), is a
late-middle-aged burly Chapelizod tavernkeeper named Humphrey Chimpden
Earwicker, about whom an embarrassing Peeping Tom scandal has recently been
bruited, published abroad, and even balladized within the walls of his own
hospitable premises. The incident—if there really was one, for we are never
made quite sure—was rumored to have occurred in Phoneix Park (or was it Eden?
was it Cavalry?), possibly at night, and to have involved, besides the dreamer,
two servant girls in the bushes and three drunken British-solider witnesses.
Four old tavern cronies, who are confused with the four Evangelists, four
quarters of the world, and four posts of the bed, rehearse the legend variously,
while a zodiac of inebriate customers toss it about, refreshed by more and more
of their own confused elucidations” (p 257).

Special
Footer Notations in Finnegans Wake

“it’s as simple as A.B.C., the two mixers, we mean” (p
65)

“I teachet you in fair, my elders, the W.X.Y.Z. and
P.Q.R.S. of legatine powers” (p 484)

J.W.P. B p
17

J.W.P. C p 33

J.W.P. D p 49

J.W.P. E p 65

J.W.P. F p 81

G p 97

H p 113

I p 129

K p 145

L p 161

M p 177

N p 193

O p 209

P p 225

Q p 241

R p 257

X p 321

Y p 337

Z p 353

2A p 369

2B p 385

2D p 417

2E p 433

2F p 449

2G p 465

2H p 481

2I p 497

2K p 513

2L p 529

2M p 545

2N p 561

2O p 577

2P p 593

2Q p 609

2Q2 p 611

Paris, 1922-1939 p
628

Breakdown of special footers*:

B – R (pgs
17-257)

X, Y, Z (pgs
321-353)

2A – 2B (pgs
369-385)

2D – 2Q (pgs
417-609)

2Q2 (p
611)

*Missing letters A, J, 2C, 2J, 2R

Collective
Tradition & the Individual in Finnegans
Wake

Finnegans
Wake
and its Fall in Phoenix Park, along with HCE & ALP (fully named as Harold/Humphrey
Chimpden Earwicker and Annie/Anne/Anna Livia Plurabelle), hold the dream-masked
telling of the Fall of Adam & Eve in the Garden of Eden. The story of He
& She (pgs 579-580) is told, retold and re-retold through multi-various
perceptions surrounding the all-centering and archetypal presence of HCE &
ALP (Adam & Eve) and their two sons, Shem and Shaun (Cain and Abel).

For many Catholics, HCE represents the All-Mighty
Father God, ALP represents the Virgin Mary, Shaun represents the Son Jesus, the
Four Old Men (and Mamalujo) represent the four disciples Matthew, Mark, Luke
and John, while Ireland represents the Holy Ghost. The “wake” could either be
“funereal” or “resurrective.” HCE further represents the “thunder father” and
“Father Times” while ALP further represents the “river mother” and “Mother
Spacies” (p 600).

It’s also useful to note that the book opens up with
the family by the names of Mr. and Mrs. Porter, Kevin and Jerry Porter (who are
twins), and a daughter named Isobel Porter. Once the dream begins the
characters are thus named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (Mr. Porter), Anna Livia
Plurabelle (Mrs. Porter), Shaun (Kevin), Shem (Jerry), and Issy (Isobel).

Referencing the “Great Sleep” that ALP undertakes at
the end of the book and reemerges from at the beginning of the book, Joyce
writes somewhere in the middle:

“For as Anna was at the beginning lives yet and will
return after great deap sleap rerising and a white night high with a cows of
Drommhiem as shower as there’s a wet enclouded in Westwicklow or a little black
rose a truant in a thorntree. We drames our dreams tell Bappy returns. And Sein
annews. We will not say it shall not be, this passing of order and order’s
coming, but in the herbest country and in the country around Blath as in that
city self of legionds they look for its being ever yet” (p 277).

By the end of the book, ALP is winding down into the
sea and gives the reader an amazing soliloquy of her past and her future fate:

“Now a younger’s there. Try not to part. Be happy,
dear ones! May I be wrong! For she’ll be sweet for you as I was sweet when I
came down out of me mother. My great blue bedroom, the air so quiet, scarce a
cloud. In peace and silence. I could have stayed up there for always only. It’s
something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall. And let her rain now if she
likes. Gently or strongly as she likes. Anyway let her rain for my time is
come. I done me best when I was let” (p 627).

Then a page later the end comes, but the final
sentence famously wraps itself around to the very first sentence of the book,
reading thus:

“A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun,
past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a
commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs” (pgs 628, 3).

And as ALP predicted the rain at the end of the book,
the reader finds the cycle renewed in the beginning:

“So then she started raining, raining, and in a pair
of changers, be dome ter, she was back again” (p 22).

The cycle ends and begins and ends over and over again and again much like Collective Tradition upon the Individual who is born and develops and (perhaps) finds the ever-invisible circular socio-system dream-like and mythic, a manifestation of circular reaction, and at times feeling like a cosmic-subconscious-abstract superorganism (or supraorganism) encapsulates and manages the collective human consciousness-unconsciousness (as well as Culture, Politics and Economics).

Our ancestors in ancient times referred to this cosmic-subconscious-abstract superorganism as a “World-Soul.” The metaphysical World-Soul is a never-ending energy which binds all living things through a distribution of intelligence, and may either be conscious, unconscious or intuitive or all of the above. The World-Soul (or Anima Mundi) further connects every Individual by amassing the billions of souls in the world into a single organismic unit rather than collections of individuals. If the soul is inside the human body, the human body is inside the World-Soul which is inside the Cosmic Earth moving in Space along with other Cosmic Bodies. A Supernatural God, the Ultimate Cosmic Being, could still be All-Encompassing, which would continue to validate the earthly human religions.

“We may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we’re
presurely destined to be odd’s without ends” (p 455).

In Timaeus
(c. 360 B.C.),
Plato explains: “Therefore, we may consequently
state that: this world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and
intelligence… a single visible living entity containing all other living
entities, which by their nature are all related.”

What may be an additional connection of this
invisible-cosmic-subconscious-abstract superorganism binding all living things as
one is “Monopsychism” (a
doctrine of the Jewish Kabbalah), which can mean that all living things share
the same eternal consciousness, much like the characters (especially the two
sons) in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
who share a variation of identities stemming from their Father HCE and his
nocturnal dream.

In Psychology and the East (1978), C.G. Jung commented: “The development of Western philosophy during the last two centuries has succeeded in isolating the mind in its own sphere and in severing it from its primordial oneness with the universe. Man himself has ceased to be the microcosm and eidolon of the cosmos, and his ‘anima’ is no longer the consubstantial scintilla, spark of the Anima Mundi, the World Soul” (see section “Psychological Commentary on The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation”).

C.G. Jung further developed the idea of “Unus Mundus” (or “One World”), which is the “concept of an underlying unified reality from which everything emerges and to which everything returns.”

Finnegans Wake certainly
embodies these concepts.

What then of
the Individual, of the mortal “I”?

One can start with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The Over-Soul” published in 1841.

In 1922, Rudolf Steiner wrote: “Most of all, however, our times are suffering from the lack of any basic social understanding of how work can be incorporated into the social organism correctly, so that everything we do is truly performed for the sake of our fellow human beings. We can acquire this understanding only by learning to really insert our ‘I’ into the human community. New social forms will not be provided by nature but can emerge only from the human ‘I’ through real, person-to-person understanding—that is, when the needs of others become a matter of direct experience for us.”

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The Individual or the “I” can also be further divided
down into the twelve atavistic archetypes (also found in Finnegans Wake): The Explorer, the Innocent, the Ruler, the Rebel, the
Magician, the Hero, the Sage, the Lover, the Orphan, the Jester, the Caregiver,
and the Creator.

Finnegans
Wake
is a labyrinth of a unified reality that emerges, repeats and returns, and can
be studied deeply for years to come. Sadly, James Joyce never won the Nobel
Prize for Literature.

“What is the fascination of this book? Why are we magnetized by its secret? And again we ask, by what warrant does the author make his message so hard to decipher—and by what act of creative largesse does he compensate us so richly for our labors” (Key, p 355).

“Often a Joycean word will mean more than the sum of its parts, just as a musical chord means more than the sum of the notes composing it. An example occurs in ‘persequestellates’ in which ‘pursues’ vibrates with overtones of Persse O’Reilly, Stella, love quest, and persecutions. No wonder Joyce does not read as easily as Trollope or Louis Bromfield” (Key, p 357).

Joseph John Campbell, American Professor of Literature at Sarah Lawrence College who worked in comparative mythology and comparative religion (1904-1987)

“Finnegans Wake is fellow to the Purāṇas of the Hindus, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Apocalyptic writings of the Persians and the Jews, the scaldic Poetic Edda, and the mystical constructions of the Master Singers of the ancient Celts” (Key, p 359).

“If Joyce is sick, his disease is the neurosis of our
age. Lifting our eye from his page we find in every aspect of society the
perversion, the decay, and the disintegration of religion, love, and morality
that he has described in Finnegans Wake.
The hypocrisy of political promises, the prurient preoccupation with sex, the
measuring of all values by mercantile standards, the fascination of lurid
headlines gossip and its effect on a literate but basically ignorant
bourgeoisie—all these are mirrored to the life by this liveliest of observers”
(Key, p 361).

And let us also not forget one of Joyce’s numerous
clues about Finnegans Wake: “It ought
to be always remembered in connection with what has gone before” (p 69).

James Joyce’s works also include Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and Ulysses (1922).

“The American novelist CG FEWSTON tells a satisfying tale, bolstered by psychology and far-ranging philosophy, calling upon Joseph Campbell, J. D. Salinger, the King James Bible, and Othello.”

“In this way, the author lends intellectual heft to a family story, exploring the ‘purity’ of art, the ‘corrupting’ influences of publishing, the solitary artist, and the messy interconnectedness of human relationships.”

CG FEWSTON is an American novelist, a former visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome. He’s also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) based in London. He has a B.A. in English, an M.Ed. in Higher Education Leadership (honors), an M.A. in Literature (honors) from Stony Brook University, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing & Fiction from Southern New Hampshire University.

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